Running Out of Time
by Amberlee
Summary: When I was a young man, I truly did believe the world was mine. Now I'm walkin' down the back streets and, oh, I may be running out of time. Jim Byrnes


**WARNING:** This story is set during the events of the upcoming movie _The Source_ but contains no real spoilers.  
**Notes:** Highlander and its characters don't belong to me. I'm just taking Joe down to the bar for a drink. Thanks to Laura and Lori for the look over. Words below inspired by Psalm 27, Ecclesiastes 3:1-9, _ Of Whom Shall I Be Afraid _ , and _ Running Out of Time _ by Jim Byrnes.

**Running Out of Time**

Everything starts somewhere; has a beginning and an end. Joe Dawson doesn't like to think about endings but, more often than not, he does.

He thinks about the end of his time as a football player, the end of his relationship with Betsy, and the end of running on his own two feet. He thinks about the end of his affair with Laura and how another man raised his daughter. And he thinks about death. A lot. He thinks about Tessa and Lauren and Ian and Jack Shapiro's boy. He thinks about Richie. He thinks about every Immortal Duncan's ever beheaded. He thinks about Darius, and Rebecca, and Fitz. He thinks about standing in a field with the muzzle of a gun pressed to the back of his head. He thinks about the black that closes in like a shroud and the way your heart skips time; about how your chest tightens and you struggle to draw breath; about how, just before you close your eyes in what you are certain will be the last moments of your life, you really do see the faces of everyone you've ever loved.

He knows one day his number will be up, and that it's a fair bet he won't be going in his sleep. He's taken a mine explosion and bullets, punches and electric shocks, knife wounds and injections. He's already cheated the ferryman one too many times. He always wears his cross, goes to confession on a regular basis, carries the St. Christopher his grandmother gave him, and does his best to be ready, because if life has taught Joe Dawson only one thing, it's that nobody gets to choose the day or time of reckoning.

It can be a lonely life, the life of a Watcher. A life of secrets and shadows and danger. A life lived on the fringe -- on the ragged edge -- and if you fall there is no one to catch you. It's a life that places you in dark alleys late at night with cold-blooded killers and tempts you with the lure of living outside the law. You must watch and say nothing, do nothing, when Immortals prey on mortals. They are like falcons or eagles, and you are but an ornithologist taking notes as they pluck a rodent from a field for dinner. You must run from police and investigators as if you are the criminal when your assignment is the one to blame. You must dispose of decapitated bodies like so many headless dandelion stems. It is a life of frustration and anger and outrage.

It is also a life of mystery and magic, a life of arcane knowledge and immense living history, of intangible rewards and indescribable wonders.

Joe's a long way from Chicago's South Shore where his life began, and as he sits in a dingy bar in a burned out husk of a city in Eastern Europe he can feel in his bones that the end won't be long coming. There are things he's seen that no man should. Things he's done no man should do. Mistakes he's made he wishes he could rectify and harm he's caused that can't be healed. In the moments alone at night in the dark before he goes to sleep he prays. He asks God to forgive him because there's no human being who ever will. The few Watchers left are hidden away in back streets struggling to salvage what they can of the Chronicles while the world around them spirals into chaos. Time is running out. He can hear it ticking like the steady beat of the blues with the resolution chord only a few bars away.

The Bible says for everything there is a season, and with every end there is the birth of a new beginning. A resurrection. Joe Dawson likes to think about that beginning -- though he seldom does -- because he has faith. He has faith in God, and Christ, and Duncan MacLeod of the Clan MacLeod. And as he finishes off his scotch and waits for the last few notes of the song on the jukebox to fade away before pulling out they keys to his beat up old Chevy, he hopes to heaven he'll be around to see it.

It's a fair bet, though, that he won't.


End file.
